Fayetteville Farmers Market to debut this June

Fayetteville  Starting this summer, residents of the eastern suburbs will have to travel no farther than the Fayetteville Towne Center to get locally-grown and produced goods straight from the farm.

Every Thursday afternoon, from June 5 to Oct. 30, 25 farmers will set up shop in the Towne Center parking lot for the Fayetteville Farmers Market CNY. Stephanie Lipsey, the market manager, decided the time was right to organize a farmers market in the eastern suburbs because an overwhelming number of her customers were asking for one.

“I think it’s something that the community here is lacking,” said Lipsey, one of the owners of Drover Hill Farm in Earlville, who attends several farmers markets each week. “I’ve heard from our customer base in the Syracuse area, and a lot of those people are looking for something closer, instead of driving all the way out to the Regional Market. Some people don’t want the hustle and bustle of the Regional Market and they want to support local farmers and producers – this market will give them all of that.”

The Fayetteville Farmers Market will be structured similarly to the market in Cazenovia, in the sense that there will be a smaller number of vendors as compared to large markets like the Regional Market, but it will be a “producer-only” market, meaning that only food or food products will be for sale by the farmers who have grown or made them.

The list of vendors still has not been set in stone, but Lipsey said customers can expect plenty of artisan breads, flowers and bouquets, herbs, a variety of mushrooms, as well as meats like beef, pork, lamb and chicken, eggs, cheese, whole and chocolate milk, and more.

“I get the question ‘Why don’t you have it on Saturday?’ a lot,” Lipsey said. “But people don’t realize that all of these farmers are already committed to markets they’ve been going to for years. And they aren’t going to change – like us, for example – we’ll never leave the Caz market, which is on Saturday. And we do two other markets on that day as well.”